My uni had an original 1800s style beam engine (from a whiskey distillery) as a feature in the Engineering faculty building foyer. It did move, but driven by electricity, and only a couple of times a year AFAIR.

https://forum.irishwhiskeysociety.com/viewtopic.php-p=12194....

My technophile uncle gave me one in the late 80s when he upgraded, even came with a monster of a daisy wheel printer. Can't remember what the WP was, but I remember being amused with V1.0 Microsoft Basic which came on a cartridge.

This feature has been part of bash since 5.1 (ca 2020), though it may not be enabled in all distros.

  cd src/bash-5.3/examples/loadables
  make accept
  enable -f ./accept accept
  (accept -r RHOST -v SOCKETFD -b 127.0.0.1 8000; 
    read -u $SOCKETFD SOCKETDATA; 
    printf "%s: %s\n" "$RHOST" "$SOCKETDATA";
    printf "goodbye, world\n" 1>&${SOCKETFD} ) &
  nc 127.0.0.1 8000 <<< "hello, world"

For real use you may need to add "exec {SOCKETFD}<&-" to close the FD.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39369749 (2024)

Plus /actual/ flywheels to compensate for non-synchronous generation: https://www.esbinternational.ie/case-studies/details/moneypo...

You would need supercapacitors, but you can make an inverter emulate inertia almost as well as flywheels, and more than well enough to not make a difference once you push the energy into a few kilometers of non-zero impedance grid.

supercapacitors are quite difficult because they can explode

I have some news about flywheels...

Land grab strategy 101.

Not as long as there's money to be made schilling and selling "qualifications" in prompt engineering.

This is how it works. Ireland was a net beneficiary until 2018, and now it is a net contributor (one of only 10 net contributors). These are decades long investments, Poland joined in 2004. Per capita Poland is not the "greatest" beneficiary but I don't think that will help win any arguments for those already resistant to facts or reasoning. https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/12/09/eu-budget-who-p...

\usepackage{comicsans}

"updoc" is still my favourite joke name. A long time ago (predating E lang's updoc afaict) I wrote a toy markup for semi-technical docs, named so with the specific intention of dropping it casually into conversation. Still funny :D

showdead=no in user settings hides flagged & moderator killed posts

I tried setting showdead=yes but two comments I remember seeing earlier today (as replies to one of my comments) are still gone. Does anyone what else might have happened to them?

Maybe the posters might have deleted the comments themselves?

I often post comments on HN, just to delete them 5 minutes later when I realize I don’t care to deal with the replies I’ll eventually get.

You have to be quick because if someone does reply, you can no longer delete your message.

One benefit of this forum is that they purposely passed over notifications precisely to save us from the temptation to "deal with" replies.

And I very much appreciate that feature, and hope it never changes.

However when I make comments here, I do it with the intention of reading what people have to say in response.

If I am making a comment with the intention to ignore the responses to it, then that’s a good signal for myself that what I am writing is likely not an appropriate comment for HN, and then delete it.

I didn't realise messages even had a delete button. I'm going to reply here so I can check.

edit: you're right, there's a delete button.